NOTES AND NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF ART

"The Belknap Collection of Silver and Portraits" is on view at The New-York Historical Society through Feb. 4, l989.

The society says the display includes some of "the finest selections of art and artifacts from America's Colonial, Revolutionary and Federal periods."The show allows the work of silversmiths to be examined alongside the portraits of the people who originally owned the silver.

-LOS ANGELES (AP) - Philip Conisbee, a specialist in 18th-century French art, has been named curator of European Paintings and Sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Conisbee, who is recognized for his expertise in European painting from the Early Italian Renaissance to the late 19th-century French Impressionist and Post-Impressonist movements, had been curator of French paintings at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts since 1986.

-NEW YORK (AP) - "Courbet Reconsidered," on show at the Brooklyn Museum through Jan. 16, 1989, is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of the French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) in the United States for nearly 30 years, the museum says.

It includes 85 paintings and 12 drawings on loan from more than 50 public and private collections in the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. After it closes at the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Feb.19-April 30, 1989.